mshawpyle's Full Review: Jan Morris - Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
People may be measured by the fashion in which they break bad news to one. The news that Ed Grover is facing a more definite eviction notice from the planet, with more of a date certain on it, than are the rest of us – because, my friends, we are all hurtling towards eternity at the rate of sixty seconds per minute, and don’t kid yourself that you have dibs on seeing the sun rise on any given tomorrow – was news none of us wish to hear. The severe mercy in my hearing of it was that it was Peter Wm Warn who was the bearer of these grave tidings: whom I trust, and rightly, for Peter in his hard-won wisdom (wisdom grows in the silt that the flood of suffering leaves behind) found the only possible way to soften the blow. (And I might, really, have guessed, had I had my wits about me, that, as Peter has reminded me, Cindy was the Prime Mover in these tributes.)
Tributes, send-offs, Festschrifts, are very like simpler wakes for those lost to us, and very like simpler vigils for the gravely ill: they are as much – perhaps more – for the bereft or those who shall be, than for those who are going on before. There is a healing balm for the soul that is instinct in the elegiac mode.
Few have worked the elegiac mode to more affecting ends than Jan, né James, Morris, chronicler of the Empire, loving miniaturist of exotic places, an historian amidst the travel writers with the grace of a brilliant and evocative travel essayist amongst the historians. It is apt – indeed, it is meet, right, and my bounden duty – to find in her swansong a perfect tribute to Ed.
Jan Morris has taken for her text in her final homily the shabby elegance and decayed glory of Trieste, an orphan of the receded tides of Habsburg imperium, a city and a history perfumed with the scent of its own mortality. In a sense more profound than any imaginings of Stirling’s, Trieste has become an island in the sea of time. Its mood is permanently autumnal, its glories are behind it, and it stands on the Adriatic strand unmoored from its high origins. No Archducal households now lend it grace; if it has become Italy’s window on the East, giving upon the former Yugoslavia, it yet no longer attains to the stature it knew as the principal port for the Austro-Hungarian Diarchy.
Svevo and Magris, Joyce, Rilke, and Burton, all trod its ways in their time, and such is the measure of great writers that, even when they are past, as much as – with Magris, and with Morris herself – in their presence, they create a sense of place that does not fade, and informs the future.
Since Cæsar, passing, wrote laconically of Tergeste, much has befallen Trieste, and all of it creates strange harmonics in Morris’s Æloian prose. Trieste has been a realm of the mind and the heart, and especially of the subconscious, throughout its days. It cast itself into the arms of Habsburg, beginning five and a quarter centuries of Habsburg rule, to escape the rapacious embrace of Venice, as if turning to a stronger protector to escape an abusive mate. As Frederic Morton, the unsurpassed chronicler of Vienna in the Habsburg twilight, notes, it seems no accident that it was in the febrile old age of the most outwardly stable and conservative of empires, that Joyce began his journeys upon the stream of consciousness – even as Freud, in the Viennese heart of that empire, plumbed the depths thereof. And Jan Morris’s exquisite touch upon the keys is perfectly matched to the minor themes that sound in Trieste.
Trieste, like the Habsburg polity in parvo, was and remains yet a kaleidoscopic scene, part Italian, part Serb, Orthodox and Catholic, Western and Eastern, the distilled quintessence of Ruritanian Mitteleuropa. None has a more suited palette and defter touch for such portraiture than does Jan Morris.
For all its thrice-imperial history, for all its stonework, for all its tracery of wrought-iron, Trieste, from cathedral to castle to sidewalk café, has never truly been a city of imperishable marble, but a rococo fantasy of plaster and gilt. It is seen best with closed eyes. The Venetians never understood this, any more than did the Slavs who also claim Trieste; the Habsburgs understood it better, but not sufficiently; D’Annunzio, whose blood-spattered farce is the subject of some of Morris’s most incisive prose, understood it not at all.
Trieste’s history suggests that it is a fit subject for a highly-colored chronicle, in bold strokes and rich hues. Trieste’s feel, its genius loci, demands silverpoint. Jan Morris is the only possible choice to limn its true lineaments.
For in the end, the theme of Trieste, and of Morris on Trieste, is one of a curiously hopeful loss. Preserved, a rococo fantasy of plaster and gilt makes the same statement, with the same unshakeable confidence, as does Johann Balthasar Neumann’s superb Vierzehnheilegen Church, in Bamberg. Tattered and weathered, as in that Trieste of the mind that Morris depicts, plaster and gilt make another statement entirely. What, after all, is Trieste now? Its natural hinterland is barred to it by a complication of borders. Its past is a thing of memory, and the sources that created and sustained it are no more. It spent the better part of the last century as a political bone to be fought and snarled over, and war has had its way with it. It is adrift in a time that suits it but little.
And yet…. There is a curious and wondrous freedom in having surrendered to the fading of the light. There is a balm for the spirit in making peace with loss and the prospect of loss, there is healing and peace in the dignified cessation of struggle. This, Morris’s elegy for the fading Trieste, is Morris’s farewell to a long career of some of the most plangent and affecting writing in our English tongue, and it is a crowning and final glory of achievement. There is freedom in repose, in the last, long rest before the winter sets in, the golden sheaves of the hoarded years of harvest safely gathered in. There is freedom in repose.
People may be measured by the extent to which news of their possible loss leaves one diminished. The prospective loss of Ed Grover is a sore and grievous one. Yet there will remain, with us, so much of the best of him, in his wisdom and hard-won grace, that it were selfish to wish him bound here in any pain. Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass!
And as for us who remain, warmed by his gifts and memory?
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Godspeed, Ed, and may these next months bear but lightly upon you; and may our respect and gratitude for all that you have shared with us, help buoy you up.
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